So...on my WordPress blog I used to say "follow me on twitter!" with a link to my twitter account. Then folks would click on it, and they'd get updated about my new articles published to WordPress by twitter (because I'd write a post on twitter linking to all my new articles).
Since the fediverse appeared, I now say "follow me on mastodon!" with a link to my mastodon account. Then folks click on it, and they get updated about my new articles published to WordPress by mastodon (because I write a post on mastodon linking to all my new articles).
So now if I have this WordPress ActivityPub plugin, what do I say instead of "follow me on X?" And what should it link-to?
This is a question of UX. I could explain to someone on mastodon how to follow my WordPress site using ActivityPub (tell them to copy the URL into their mastodon instance search field). But is there any one link that will magically work for all users to subscribe-to WordPress in whatever their ActivityPub client is?
This really is a thing missing before the regular Jane or Joe would even consider signing on. The fundamental difference (federation) makes it hard enough for the technically unsavy. The "but where do i make an account for this new reddit?"...
I know we’re talking about a time before a lot of young adults were born, but comparing the closure of a federated instance to what happened to a lot of people and families on 9/11 is actually pretty fucked up.
Edit: Alright. Apparently some atrocities are okay because other atrocities happen, too. Love you guys.
Americans have no sense of perspective. I have friends who were affected by the tower collapse in NY. We sent more service members to die looking for Bin Laden than were killed that day. And more than 10 times a many people die from gun violence in the US every God damned year than died in all four plane strikes. And every one of those other tragedies destroys families and communities.
It’s so overblown it’s practically a meme to everyone but the boomers and Christian “patriots” who need a way to make people angry about foreigners so they can ignore our home grown violent tendencies.
I am even surprised that the Taliban let someone buy the queer.af domain.
But it's also a cool feature of the federation, an instance is closed by an authoritarian government, tons of others are still there, and migration is easy, so you don't loose you whole network. Still an annoyance for the user, but not as much an annoyance as when a centralized social media closes.
Just because they can take control of the domain doesn't mean they somehow have access to the data any servers that used the domain have. Those servers were, i feel confident, not in Afghanistan. Domains are just redirects, so the Taliban have nothing on any of the users.
Just as an aside: unfortunately some of the Taliban are actually very smart - in an academic sense. Some of them have gone to the best schools and universities our world has to offer… and then decided the dark ages are where we should be. Go figure. But, to clarify, they aren’t all backwards goat herders from the middle of nowhere.
Listening to people like @dessalines, Eugen Rochko and other fediverse developers would be cool! I loved the voice of the friend who emphasizes the "sh"s :)
We actually already have some interviews recorded, it's just that some of the unedited talks are two hours long. But yes, this is something we're actively working on!
I loved the voice of the friend who emphasizes the "sh"s :)
I assume you mean Laurens from the Fediverse Report. He's from the Netherlands, and has a wonderful accent and demeanor.
This is not something to blame Taliban for. Mali government was also keen on taking down .ml instances of Lemmy. This is simply a legal and reasonable reservation of country TLD domains.
Maybe, just maybe, we shouldn't be picking domains based on stuff like "hehe it says queer as fuck lul"? What did they expect to happen picking Afghanistan of all places for the domain of an LGBT instance?
The first link is post from fediverse@lemmy.world, the second link is post from fediverse@lemmy.ml, it's a same post crossposted to communities under different instance.
I have no expertise in how ActivityPub works, but my guess is it works something like this:
You make a post on instance A, you can view it on instance B. People all over the fediverse, instances C through Z are voting on your post.
The venn diagram of other instances with which instance A and instance B federate overlap but are not exactly the same. There are instances federated with instance A not visible to instance B, there are instances federated with instance B not visible to instance A.
The vote count for a post is counted by instance A and B based on which instances with which they federate. That means instance A is counting votes from instances that B cannot see, and instance B is counting votes from instances that A cannot see.
Where the Venn diagrams overlap, both instances will agree on the vote count. But the vote counts coming from instances that they don't both federate with will cause a difference in vote count.
A locked thread from 3 months ago that has been crossposted in to half a dozen groups isn't the best example of how replies and comments federate across the fediverse.
Bonfire is one of the fediverse projects I'm most excited about right now. I hope they don't get too bogged down in organizational work right now. They're awfully close to version 1.0
Running instances costs money & labor, and I predict that many instance admins will be happy to accept various forms of assistance, and the CIA/FBI/etc-backed organizations will be happy to help. The assistance might be just money, which comes with strings attached such as simply having the ear of the admins. The assistance might be “moderation tools,” to save labor efforts.
I think the instances that choose to federate with corporate social media (which are already captured by feds) will probably be the easiest to gain control of. If you’ve been following the corpo federation discourse, you might have noticed that the instances with the largest user bases tend to be the most interested in federating with the corpo social media.
Do they also control email? As in all email servers that are "federated" with one another? Conspiracy thinking is dangerous. Maybe I work for "the feds"? Maybe you do and you've already been subverted against your own conscious wishes and this is a honeypot you're posting?
At some point you have to trust something or someone or you end up in the trust-equivalent of solipsism.
The moral is obvious. You can't trust code that you did
not totally create yourself. (Especially code from companies that employ people like me.)
Take this and abstract. Eventually you'll either need to be a wholly offline hermit, or accept that there is risk of subversion at every level and that risk must be tolerated in order to use the tech.
Those who suffer from conspiracy phobia are fond of saying: “Do you actually think there’s a group of people sitting around in a room plotting things?” For some reason that image is assumed to be so patently absurd as to invite only disclaimers. But where else would people of power get together – on park benches or carousels? Indeed, they meet in rooms: corporate boardrooms, Pentagon command rooms, at the Bohemian Grove, in the choice dining rooms at the best restaurants, resorts, hotels, and estates, in the many conference rooms at the White House, the NSA, the CIA, or wherever. And, yes, they consciously plot – though they call it “planning” and “strategizing” – and they do so in great secrecy, often resisting all efforts at public disclosure. No one confabulates and plans more than political and corporate elites and their hired specialists. To make the world safe for those who own it, politically active elements of the owning class have created a national security state that expends billions of dollars and enlists the efforts of vast numbers of people.
The ones that don’t choose to may eventually find themselves defederated from the ones that do. We’ll get walled off from the large instances that “play ball”.
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